On Salisbury Plain
by Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod
Summary: The team accidentally pick up a tag-along, which would be less of a problem if she weren't Lester's daughter. Well, Liz hadn’t *meant* to spend her afternoon chasing troodontids on Salisbury Plain...
1. From Leukaemia Wards to the M4

**A/N:** The hospital Jamie is in is Guy's and St. Thomas's in London, because I may need to use the location again and I have considerable personal experience of it. However, I have no idea if it has a children's leukaemia ward. Set approximately a year after_ If You Go Down To The Woods Today_. _**Please read and review!**_

* * *

The ward was greyish, as hospital wards often are. A boy sat in his bed, absorbed by computer solitaire, and looked up quickly and set the laptop aside as firm footsteps approached and smiled broadly. "Liz!"

"Hi, Jamie." Liz smiled back and abstracted a chair from the bedside of Jamie's neighbour so she could sit down, hoisting her backpack onto her lap. "Hanging in there?"

"Yeah." He put more cheerfulness into the smile for her, although they both knew there wasn't too much to smile about; after a solid two and a half years in remission, Jamie Burke-Lester's acute lymphoblastic leukaemia had returned, and now he was back in chemotherapy, which he detested. It made his hair fall out, and it made him throw up.

"Good. I brought the things you asked for. Plus extras." Liz opened the rucksack and started to pull things out.

"Ooh. Extras?" Jamie sat up straight, watching as a pile developed on his bed; a new A4 sketchbook, a tin of drawing pencils, a packet of mechanical pencils, a fresh rubber, as well as a set of brightly coloured felt-tipped pens and a memory stick.

"Yup, extras. The pens are from me, the memory stick is from Dad; he says it might not be as good as drawing from life, but drawing from photos is better than drawing from memory. Where's your laptop?"

"Bedside thingy." Jamie gestured vaguely, absorbed in the new equipment. "Liz, you're officially the best big sister _ever_. I finished the old sketchbook yesterday morning and I've been bored as hell ever since."

Liz laughed, and hugged him. "You're officially the best little brother ever. Can I see the old sketchbook?"

"Sure."

His sister picked up the old book and flipped through it. Jamie had inherited his dark hair and eyes from his mother, his talent for drawing from his father, and his liking for compromise from neither –hence the double-barrelled name; after Sir James Lester and Kathy Burke had divorced, Liz had chosen to stick with Lester, the youngest, Nicky, had changed his surname to Burke, but Jamie had stayed neutral and picked Burke-Lester- but right now, only the talent for drawing concerned Liz. Here, a detail from the cover of his latest favourite book, here, a cartoon of a nurse who had failed to befriend him, here a page of hand sketches for practise. Liz whistled appreciatively. "You're damned good."

"I know," said Jamie smugly, and he grinned and ducked as she swiped at him. "You know, I love how you and Dad don't treat me like I'm fragile now."

"You are fragile," Liz said matter-of-factly.

"Yeah, but less of the tread-softly-round-the-invalid from Mum and Nicky would be cool."

"Should I mention it?"

"What!" Jamie squawked. "Hell, no! You'll start a feud, I know you!"

"That's me," Liz agreed mildly. "Speaking of Dad, can I take this home to show him?" She brandished the sketchbook she'd been looking through.

"'Course." Jamie looked up from writing his name and three addresses (his mother's, his father's, and the leukaemia ward's) in the front of the new sketchbook, which would take him less time if he weren't using red and black for alternate letters. "Get him to write me a nice long email about which ones he likes and why and what I've done wrong and all that."

"I can do better than that. I'll send him to see you," Liz said, feeling slightly guilty that she knew why Lester had had to miss his last appointment to see Jamie and Jamie didn't. Entelodonts in Glasgow added up to an incident that required his personal attendance, and although Lester had been cross about it he hadn't been able to do anything about it other than warn Liz she'd be on her own in the flat for a couple of days; Liz understood well enough the demands of her father's job, but she'd been unhappy about it for Jamie's sake.

"Can you?" Jamie said, sounding highly pleased. "I know he's really busy and his job's-"

"I can," Liz said firmly. "Look, Jamie, he didn't want to miss seeing you, he was so pissed off about it, but the j-"

"I know," Jamie interrupted. There was a pause, then he said: "We never did find out what his job was, did we? Unless he told you."

"No," Liz lied, feeling even guiltier; she had, in fact, known for nearly the past year what Lester did for a living, ever since she'd found herself and her friends on the lunch menu of a rogue deinonychus, but she knew she couldn't tell Jamie about the ARC. "I just know it's highly secret and Home-Officey and the hours are crap, and we knew that anyway. Look, Jamie, I can't stay long, this is my lunch-break at school, but do you want me to read to you for a bit?"

"Please!" Jamie, successfully diverted, retrieved the sixth Harry Potter from his bedside table and passed it to Liz, who opened it to the right page and drew breath to speak- and then her phone bleeped, Liz leapt a foot in the air and dropped the book, and Jamie burst out laughing.

A nurse hurried over and frowned at them. "We'll hush," Jamie promised, and then added, "Liz, what is it?"

Liz was staring at her phone and looking very puzzled. The text message was short and to the point: _where r u? fire skl. teachers frantic_.

"Who's it from?" Jamie asked nosily, craning his neck to try and see.

"Juliet," Liz said absently.

"Your girlfriend? The one you went on D of E with last year?"

"Yeah, only she wasn't my girlfriend then." Liz got up. "Jamie, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to go, there's been a fire at school." She hugged her brother. "See you soon. Have fun with the sketchbook and stuff. Love you."

"Bye, Liz."

Liz walked quickly away, turning at the end of the ward before she pushed open the door to raise a hand to Jamie, who waved in return. Then she left, marched down the corridor and called the lift. Once inside, she phoned Juliet. "Hi Jules?"

"Liz! Where are you?" Juliet sounded excited.

"Hospital. Visiting Jamie. I did tell you."

"Oh yeah, I remember... just let me tell Miss Vandermeer..." There was a brief silence while Juliet explained Liz's whereabouts to the irascible Physics teacher. "How's Jamie?"

"No better, no worse. Look, what happened? What fire?" Liz left the lift and turned the corner, heading for the main glass doors to the outside.

"Dunno. Just a fire. We all got evacuated, and the firefighters came, and they're still in there so we're being sent home."

"Crap, are we? I haven't got my keys. They're in my jacket in my locker." Liz leant against a wall; no point going anywhere till she knew where she was going.

"Yeah, I haven't even got my Oystercard 'cause the whole lot was in my bag. Except my phone, obviously."

"Lucky, that. D'you want me to come and pick you up and we can catch a movie or something?" Liz suggested, making plans in her head. She couldn't go home, not without her keys, and the concierge loathed her and wasn't likely to lend her the spare set of keys. So, if she killed time in the city, a movie or something- that would be okay- but she'd have to phone Dad to find out when he was getting home- or could she get the keys from Dad herself? Would he mind her turning up at the ARC?

"I'd love to, but I have Maths tutoring," Juliet said regretfully. "Calculus is evil and only strange people like you can understand it."

"What, even when the school's on fire?" Liz wanted to know, surprised.

"Yeah. According to Ed, Maths tutoring stops for no man, beast or d- disaster."

Liz sighed. "What did he really say? Man, beast or-?"

"Man, beast or dinosaur, actually." Juliet hesitated. "You know what he's like."

"I certainly bloody do," Liz said grimly. "Damn him, if he doesn't shut up about it I'll..."

"Disembowel him?" Juliet suggested.

The other teenager laughed. "That'd be a good start. God, I wish he'd just get over it. Anyway, good luck with the tutoring."

"Thanks. I'll need it."

"You're not as bad at Maths as you think you are. See you tomorrow, then- oh, wait, are you still coming round after school tomorrow?"

"Yeah."

"Great. See you then. Bye!"

"Bye!" Juliet ended the call, and Liz tucked her phone away, smiling slightly. Juliet always made her feel more cheerful and nicer towards people in general, even Ed Mackenzie on a dinosaur rampage.

Ed Mackenzie. The smile vanished as she looked around to get her bearings. The boy was six months older than her, and like Juliet, Liz and two of Liz's friends, had been on the Duke of Edinburgh expedition that had been crashed by a deinonychus. Unlike Mark, Amandeep, or Juliet, Ed had not been willing to believe or at least pretend to believe that it hadn't been a homicidal dinosaur but a rare kind of carnivorous lizard escaped from a conservation centre. He knew a predatory dinosaur when he saw one, apparently, and he just wouldn't shut up about it. He was convinced –and he was right- that there was a government conspiracy involved. Of course, he wouldn't shout from the rooftops that he'd been chased by a prehistoric creature; he wasn't stupid enough to think he'd be believed, and anyway, he'd signed the Official Secrets Act. But he would hint and throw the word dinosaur into any casual conversation with the others, looking for someone else who thought as he did or trying to inspire them to think as he did, highly irritating Liz until three months ago she'd lost her temper with him. They'd had a row of cataclysmic proportions, both of them yelling themselves hoarse. Luckily, they hadn't been at school, and Juliet had managed to calm them down, but ever since then Ed had avoided Liz.

It wasn't as if Liz minded. He had been less and less her friend, ever since the failed D of E expedition.

She glanced around. She was now facing Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament on the opposite side of the Thames to her; since it was a sunny day, the place was heaving with tourists, and Liz sidestepped a large and chattering Japanese party with cameras at the ready and dodged a jovial American family almost on automatic before deciding on her route. If she went right along the waterfront, she would reach the ARC with little fuss and no need to work out bus or Tube routes. It would be a bit of a way, but she liked walking, and it wasn't as if she was in a hurry: it would give her time to call her father and check turning up at the ARC to filch his keys was all right with him.

Liz elbowed her way through the crowd and found her way down to the waterfront, where she got out her mobile phone again and texted her father. _fire skl haven't got keys can come borrow yours? _She sent the text, then stuffed the phone back into her rucksack and started to walk briskly along the pavement.

* * *

Sir James Lester did not, on the whole, enjoy budget meetings. They were a necessary evil, and as such he preferred not to have them interrupted, as interruptions usually meant they would be prolonged. Therefore, he was not best pleased when his BlackBerry rang towards the end of one, just when he'd been beginning to tentatively look forward to escaping. Connor Temple ground to a halt in the middle of explaining the latest addition to the anomaly detector, and stared at him.

Lester cursed to himself and retrieved the personal organiser from his jacket pocket, glaring at it. _Liz Lester has sent you a text message at 13:24._ He opened and read it, then rose. "Excuse me," he said briefly, and went out into the corridor, closing the door gently behind him; a gentle swell of conversation rose as he left.

He stood looking out of the window as Liz's phone rang and she picked it up. "Hello, Liz. What's this about a fire at school?... Are you all right? Oh yes, you were with Jamie. Yes, of course I'll visit him this evening. So who told you about the fire?... I see. As for the keys- yes, you can come to the ARC. Where are you?... All right. Call me when you reach the front of the ARC. Yes, I have a meeting to go back to... no, don't worry about it; I was bored anyway. See you then. Bye."

He put the BlackBerry away, but stood looking out of the window for a moment more. Of course, there was no reason why Liz should not come to the ARC. She already knew about it, after all, and she did need the keys. Nor was she one to chatter about it; he could testify to that. Liz had only once brought up the subject herself, and that had been to ask if the ARC had been part of the reason he and her mother had divorced, because he couldn't tell her about it.

Lester shrugged. It would be all right.

Then, with a sigh, he turned and went back into the meeting.

* * *

Half an hour later, Liz reached the glass behemoth of modern architecture and looked at it with some trepidation. She wasn't totally sure she was welcome here.

Swallowing her doubts, she took out her phone and speed-dialled her father.

He didn't answer. She tried again. Still, there was no answer.

She waited a few more minutes and tried once more, but Lester still did not pick up the phone.

Then, eventually, she headed for the ARC, entered, and went up to the receptionist. "Excuse me. I'm Liz Lester, I'm here to see my father, Sir James Lester. He works here."

"Why?" the receptionist asked suspiciously, looking at her. The woman had a nose like a hatchet, and reminded Liz very much of the concierge at the block of flats she lived in, who detested her.

"Because I need to borrow his set of keys, I've lost mine. I called him and he agreed I could come and get his, and he said to call him as soon as I reached the front of the ARC, but I have and he's not responding," Liz said politely.

"You need an appointment to see Sir James," the receptionist informed her.

"I really don't think I do. Not given that I'm his own daughter." Liz chewed on the inside of her cheek, trying to disguise her worry and irritation. "If you wouldn't mind calling up to his office, I'm sure he'd confirm what I've said."

"Sir James is not available."

"I don't believe that," Liz said flatly. "I think he's just got his phone turned off. S'not the same thing. Please call up to his office."

With a sniff, the receptionist did so. A secretary answered it, saying that Sir James was not in, and the receptionist smiled at Liz, more than a hint of triumph in her expression. "Fine," Liz said, annoyed. "I'll wait here for him, then."

The receptionist did not stop smiling, but it lost its genuine edge. "I'm afraid-"

"I'm afraid that I have no intention of leaving without either seeing my father or receiving a phone call from him telling me what to do," Liz told her through gritted teeth, trying to keep a hold on her temper. "I see there are some chairs over there. I'll go and sit down."

A woman in a short skirt and admirably high heels hurried past, looking occupied. "Miss Lewis!" the receptionist exclaimed with undisguised relief, causing the woman to execute a sharp about-face. "This young woman claims to be Sir James's daughter and wishes to see him."

"Miss Lewis?" Liz enquired hopefully. She thought she remembered a Miss Lewis, battering Ed into temporary submission with cold logic and public relations half-truths not long after the encounter with the deinonychus. "I think we met before. There was an accident involving a dinosaur and a Duke of Edinburgh group, and I was in the Duke of Edinburgh group."

Recognition bloomed on the woman's face. "Oh yes. Elizabeth, isn't it?"

"Liz," Liz corrected.

"-Liz, then. Yes, I remember. I'm afraid Sir James is not here at the moment, he's in a meeting with the Ministry of Defence. Is there a problem? It will need to be quick, I'm in rather a hurry-"

"I need to borrow his keys to get home," Liz said quickly. "There was a fire at school and I haven't got my keys. He might have said, I did phone him, he said he was in a budget meeting."

Understanding and memory joined the recognition. "Yes, he did say. He asked if I could give you the keys if you appeared, but that was just before he had to leave for the Ministry of Defence and he never gave me the keys... I don't think he anticipated this."

"What's this?" Liz asked, realising that this was a situation with which she could cope. Frantic adult? No problem. Liz was used to frantic adults, or at least extremely busy ones.

"Well-" Jenny looked doubtful.

"Miss Lewis, d'you remember what happened in that accident last year? I hit a dinosaur over the head with a stick. Since then, nothing surprises me." This was not entirely true, but it was a convenient white lie, and Liz was not against convenient white lies.

"There's a pack of troodontids in Salisbury," Jenny Lewis said; perhaps, at another time, when she was in less of a hurry, she would not have answered Liz's question, but that was academic. "The military are having knickerfits, and so are a bunch of hippies who may have lost a colleague to them." She looked hard at Liz. "How good are you at keeping quiet and doing what you're told?"

"Very. CCF saw to that." Liz had gone, again, for the convenient white lie; Cadet Sergeants in the Combined Cadet Force, such as herself, did markedly less doing what they were told than ordinary Cadets.

"CCF?.. Tell me later. I think you'd better come with me." Miss Lewis glanced at her watch and cursed. "Now."

As Liz followed Jenny down to the car park at a brisk trot, she reflected that it was really quite amazing how fast the woman could run in those horrendous heels.


	2. First Impressions

**A/N:** Set approximately a year after_ If You Go Down To The Woods Today_. _**Please read and review!**_

* * *

Miss Lewis –Jenny, Liz knew now- drove fast. She was busy negotiating her way through London and onto the M4 in her small blue car at the very edge of the speed-limit, with Liz in the passenger seat.

Liz was beginning to wonder why this was happening. It was impossible to avoid the facts; she was in a car on her way to an anomaly in Salisbury Plain with a public relations expert working for her father, and she had no real useful skills or importance- unless what she'd learned with CCF counted. She supposed it was a hasty decision on Miss Lewis's part, which the older woman would soon come to regret.

"Why did to have to go home from school?" Miss Lewis asked, braking for a traffic light. "Sir James mentioned that you did, and that was why you needed his keys, but nothing else."

"I was at St. Thomas's Hospital to see my brother, and my girlfriend texted me to say there'd been a fire at school and we all had to go home." Liz hoped the bit about her girlfriend would pass unnoticed among the rest of the information; she made a point of not being shy about having a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend, but it would be awkward if Miss Lewis turned out to be one of those people who, while not exactly homophobic, had trouble coping with the concept of teenaged girls being attracted to each other.

"Your brother? I didn't know Sir James had any other children." If Miss Lewis had been surprised by the reference to Juliet, she didn't show it.

"I have two brothers, Jamie and Nicky, but I was visiting Jamie. They live with my mother. Mum and Dad are divorced." Liz glanced out of the window as the car moved off again.

"I hope Jamie isn't seriously hurt?" Miss Lewis asked absently, giving an arrogant cyclist the finger as he swooped in front of them.

"He has leukaemia."

"Oh, I'm sorry." Jenny immediately felt very embarrassed; the girl had spoken matter-of-factly, but there was no doubt she'd been less than tactful.

"It's okay. He's been in remission before, and he will be again. Leukaemia's quite responsive to chemotherapy... Jamie hates it, though. Makes him puke. Sorry, you probably didn't want to know all that," Liz added sheepishly.

"It's all right. You live with your father, am I right? Away from your brothers?" They reached the motorway.

"Yes. I asked, when Mum and Dad got divorced." She grinned. "Actually, I demanded. I find Dad easier to cope with than Mum, and I make her cross, too, so... What about you?"

"What about m- _tosser_!" Jenny swore as a prat in a SmartCar overtook them without warning.

"I mean, what about your family. Have you got brothers?" Liz knew she was asking personal questions now, but turnabout was fair play.

"I haven't got any brothers or sisters, no. I always wanted a little sister." Jenny changed lane. "I suppose because my cousins were all five years or more older than me, and I didn't want to be the baby of the family."

"Really? Nicky seems to quite enjoy it," Liz commented.

"I was precocious enough to hate it. You mentioned something called the CCF earlier; what is it?" Jenny enquired, taking the conversation off a personal footing.

"The Combined Cadet Force. I'm in the Army section... We do weekends away and stuff. S'fun." Liz picked absently at a loose thread on her jeans.

"Interesting. Can you read maps?" Jenny felt slightly more pleased with herself than she had before when she'd realised she now had a possibly unreliable civilian child who would probably be useless tagging along, all on account of a random choice made too quickly. She was wary of the SatNav, and someone to navigate would be useful.

"Yes."

Jenny waved a hand at the glove-box. "There's a map in there. We're headed for the village of Westbury."

"Westbury?" Liz rummaged through the glove-box, found the map and then looked at Jenny, frowning. "That's near Bath, isn't it?"

"I... Yes, I think so. Why?" Jenny asked, surprised by Liz's tone and slowly recalling more about Liz Lester; she'd not only hit the dinosaur over the head with a stick, she'd then made her friends jump into a river to escape the stunned animal.

"My Uncle Theo and Auntie Alison live near there... There's a white horse at Westbury, isn't there? Carved out of the chalk?" Liz racked her brains for more knowledge about the area; she had often walked out there with her uncle or aunt or both, usually when walking their dog but sometimes just for fun.

"Yes, there is," Jenny said, astonished. Possibly Liz would actually be useful- personal knowledge of the area might be handy. "That's what the hippies- well, they call themselves pagans –were doing around there. There's a tradition that if you climb down to touch the Westbury White Horse's eye, you can make a wish and it will come true. It was a large group, with quite a few teenagers in; the older, more serious ones were there for Stonehenge, but the teenagers decided they wanted to go for an early morning stroll up to the white horse. I mean really early morning; it was pretty dark, no-one was around, and they were all tipsy at least. They reached the white horse and one of them was separated from the group and got dragged off by a pack of what they thought were hell-hounds; the rest yelled, screamed, took pictures and wrote a blog entry about it."

Liz snorted. "Helpful!"

"Yes. I prefer your jump-into-a-river approach, not least because it does less in the way of PR disasters."

The girl remained silent for a moment, and then said: "So what happened next?"

Ooh, she was _sharp_. There wasn't much physical resemblance to Lester, but Jenny would hate trying to spin half-truths to this girl as much as she would to him; they were both too likely to see through them. "What makes you think anything happened next?"

"You know what they are, more or less. Trudy somethings, you said before. I don't see how you can have identified them from a bunch of pictures taken in semi-darkness –I just bet it was on a mobile phone with a feeble flash, too- and a description in a blog post that was probably all muddled with Bacardi Breezers or whatever." Liz shrugged. "So what did happen next?"

"A boy went missing on his way to school by bike. His tracks were found. They looked as if he was trying to shake followers off, and then the bike was found abandoned and marks of a body dragged off." Jenny's lips thinned, and she did not say that blood had also been found, and that the likelihood was that Jake Newton was dead.

Liz didn't need telling that. She fiddled with the map, flipping backwards and forwards and peering out of the window to read the motorway signs and find their place on the map. After a while, she said conversationally: "You know, I looked up dino-knickerless on the Net afterwards. When I... When the nightmares stopped. And I went to the Natural History Museum and looked at the display there. Dino-knickerlesses- I mean, deinonychuses -hunt in packs too, but only one attacked us. We'd have been long dead if there were more of them. Mark at least would be a goner."

"Mm." There was nothing you could say to that, really, so Jenny changed the subject. "Where now?"

"Follow the M4 past Reading. Then we leave the M4 at Stanton St. Quintin and go down the A350, and that takes us right to Westbury," Liz answered.

"Okay."

They passed the rest of the drive in semi-silence. Occasionally, Jenny asked Liz for more directions, and once a cross man with a Scottish accent rang up on the hands-free and they had a brisk discussion about the Official Secrets Act, which Liz chose to keep quiet during since she'd never actually signed a copy of the thing herself and didn't want to be made to. The requests for directions grew more frequent towards the end of the journey, until they drew up in the off-road car park near the Westbury White Horse, where Jenny got out. After a moment's hesitation, so did Liz.

She recognised the set-up- Special Forces soldiers, a few scientists in ordinary clothes, scared civilians, and truculent policemen. It didn't look like she was going to be much use here, so she just waited by the car, backpack on her back and watching Miss Lewis stride confidently off in those absurd heels and get the measure of the situation. She wondered if she ought to phone Dad, and then decided that a voicemail saying 'Hi, Dad, I'm in Salisbury Plain with about half your employees chasing dinosaurs' would not make her father any happier.

After a while, she realised that the soldiers had noticed her, and were eyeing her with some suspicion. She pretended not to have spotted this, embarrassed, until one came over and said: "Excuse me, miss, are you lost or looking for somebody?"

Liz looked at him, and to her shock, recognised him. It was the medic who'd given her the foil blanket and horrible drink after the deinonychus incident, but he evidently didn't remember her. "Um, no. I'm Liz Lester, I'm sort of here by accident... Miss Lewis brought me. And I do know about the dinosaurs," she added. "I was attacked by one last year when I was on Duke of Edinburgh."

"Oh." He looked highly taken aback. "I see."

Liz flushed. "I know I'm not really supposed to be here. I only meant to borrow my dad's keys so I could go home, and I... sort of got swept up in things." She shrugged awkwardly.

"I see," was all he said, and he went away. Liz stayed red about the face, and shuddered as a gust of wind hit her. She really wished she had her jacket.

Then Miss Lewis came back. "Liz, did you say you knew the area?"

Liz looked up. "A bit. Why?"

"It could be useful, that's all." Miss Lewis took a harder look at her, and then her expression softened. "Are you cold?"

"Not really," Liz lied.

Miss Lewis ignored this. "You can stay in the car if you'd like."

"No, I'm... fine, thanks, I like the outdoors and I'm not that cold. Is there anything I could do, though?" Liz asked. "I'm Miss Fifth Wheel right now."

"Hm," Jenny said, staring at her in a measuring fashion. "Maybe. I don't know. I never know. Honestly, these anomalies- I can't _wait_ till Lester's pet physicists work out how to predict them... You can go and sit with the team, anyway. I daresay Connor will welcome someone to expound theories at, and Abby can probably lend you a jumper."

"Okay," Liz said uncertainly, and wandered off in the direction Miss Lewis indicated, towards the large jeep where a bleached-blonde young woman was not listening to a dark-haired, distinctly geeky-looking young man who was gesticulating excitedly, a lap-top on his lap, and an older man was leaning against the bonnet and sulking. "Hi?" she said.

The young man and woman looked up, and the sulker looked around, and Liz smiled slightly, hopefully. "I'm Liz Lester. Miss Lewis sent me here to see if you have a use for me."

"Liz Lester? I didn't know Lester had a daughter," the sulker remarked, apparently astonished.

Liz smiled thinly, foreseeing many similar comments in the near future. "He does. She kind of knows about the dinosaurs, too, so..."

Another hefty breeze blew down the back of her shirt, and she shivered. The bleached-blonde young woman fished around in the back seat of the jeep, and found a red hoodie. "Haven't you got a jacket, um... Liz?"

"No." Liz took a deep breath. "You see, what happened was there was a fire at my school and I left my jacket in my locker and it had my keys in. I went to the ARC to try and borrow Dad's keys so I could go home, but he wasn't there. The receptionist foisted me on Miss Lewis and... here I am."

There was a silence, and then, almost apologetically, the blonde handed her the hoodie. Liz smiled gratefully at her and pulled it on; it was warm and comfortable. "Thanks."

"You can come and sit down if you want," the blonde offered. "My name's Abby."

Abby nudged the geek with her foot. "Oh- er- I'm Connor," he said, and then went back to his laptop. The man who had been sulking came over and held out his hand to shake; Liz took it.

"Professor Nick Cutter," he said, and she noted the Scottish accent- he sounded like the man who'd called Miss Lewis in the car. "Just Cutter'll do."

"OK," Liz said. "Everyone calls me Liz." Connor and Abby shifted to make room for her, and she sat. The others seemed to be busy, so she took out Jamie's sketchbook, which was still in her bag, and started to look through it more carefully.

She only discovered that Abby and Connor were looking over her shoulder when Connor, tactlessly, exclaimed "My God, is that Lester?" while Liz was lingering over a particularly good portrait from life that must have taken two or three sittings and considerable work outside of that time for Jamie to complete.

As Abby kicked Connor and hissed an admonition, Liz blinked and stared hard at the picture, trying to work out what about the portrayal was so unusual. Yes, Dad was smiling, and it was the special quiet one he saved for moments when he was genuinely content, but people who didn't know him were unlikely to appreciate the difference between that and his more ordinary, all-purpose smile. The sardonic one, of course, was a different kettle of fish entirely- in fact, Lester had a veritable arsenal of facial expressions, among which smiles featured quite heavily, so Liz was not totally sure why the idea of him smiling was so odd.

She squinted at it. Possibly his hair was ruffled weirdly?

"But he's smiling!" Connor hissed in a tone he thought was subtle.

"So what if he's smiling?" Liz demanded, perplexed. "He often smiles."

"He doesn't!" Abby was kicking, jabbing and poking harder and harder in an effort to make Connor shut up, but he seemed impervious, caught up in the debate.

"Yes he does!" Liz frowned at Connor.

"Maybe at you, but not at us he doesn't!"

"Probably you annoy him!"

Connor squeaked indignantly, and then yelped as Abby finally lost her temper and thumped him in earnest.

Professor Cutter, who had been looking away from the developing argument, uninterested in watching Connor get into a fight with Lester's teenaged daughter, saw Jenny get a call while in the middle of intimidating the local constabulary that made her face go blank and then anxious. "I think we have a problem."

Jenny disposed of the senior policeman with a few well-chosen words and hurried over to them. "A pack of Girl Guides supposedly on a hike are missing half a mile from here. These troodontids are popping in and out of anomalies like Tube stations! Liz- oh, there you are -Cutter, drive or I will!"

"What?" the professor demanded, though he got into the driver's seat quickly enough.

"One of the Girl Guides is a Minister's daughter, and he was throwing a tantrum about how they've vanished without a trace- understandable, but then some stupid policeman let him know that it was something to do with a government operation, and then, of course, he found out he hadn't the security clearance for it so he is _spitting_ with rage," Jenny said very fast, doing up her seatbelt.

There was some hurried shuffling in the back seat as Connor, Abby and Liz attempted to sort themselves out without losing belongings, causing offense or tumbling into either the windscreen or the boot, and which ended with Liz and Abby in the window seats and Connor –not without protest- squashed in the middle. "What happened to them?" Abby asked, once they were settled.

"How would I know? I just know it was a patrol (that's a group of about six, I think) and their leader, and they went on a hike, and should have met up with their parents at the Carrot and Stick two hours ago, but there's no trace of them and Lieutenant Lyle is worried they may have gone through an anomaly." Jenny broke off and gave Professor Cutter brusque directions; they were travelling at considerably over the speed limit.

"Why would they go through an anomaly?" Connor said, startled. The question that immediately occurred to Nick was 'and what was Lieutenant Lyle doing in a pub?', but he was too busy not crashing into a hedge to ask it, and suspected that Jenny would not appreciate his asking.

"They're probably bolshie and inquisitive ten-year-olds who don't like their teacher- well, leader," Liz answered, feeling this was an area in which she had some expertise. "What I want to know is why they weren't in school on a school day."

"Apparently, they came from a boarding school nearby where the Guides and the Scouts are a big part of the curriculum, and every now and then they have a day where all the patrols go out hiking." Jenny cast her eyes heavenwards. "Which means there are about fifty _other _children and their teachers wandering around Wiltshire. They're being called in, but it's going to take some time for them to get out of danger. Left here!" she snapped.

They came to a screeching halt in front of the Carrot and Stick, followed by a number of Army jeeps, and leapt out to face a number of apoplectic, anxious and officious parents and a headmaster having a nervous breakdown, and all Liz could think about was whether Miss Lewis had meantto leave her car behind.

"-and what is a _teenager_ doing in your supposed _crack squad_ of scientists, Miss Lewis, I should like to know!"

Liz started as the last sentence of the minister's rant brought her abruptly back to earth again. She scrambled for a lie. "Um, actually, sir, I... I kind of... well..."

Inspiration struck like a frying pan to the head, and, acting on it, she tried to look blank and horrified. "You see, I just went out to get some milk and I- oh, God, it was horrible, I found a _corpse_! And these people think the animal they're looking for killed- killed-" She clapped a hand over her mouth, mumbled, "Excuse me!" and bolted behind the nearest sizeable bush to make the most realistic throwing-up noises she could.


	3. The Carrot and Stick

**A/N:** The nasty implement Liz is planning on using as a weapon does actually exist; my family owns one. Available from all good Homebase stores for use on stubborn weeds and small therapods. Particular warning for language in this one. _**Please read and review!**_

* * *

"... Ah. Yes. Yes, James, I do know where Liz is... no, I'm sorry, I didn't give her the keys... You never gave them to me. I found her in the lobby having an argument with the receptionist, so I took her with me. Yes, she- I _am _sorry, James, and I_ will_ ensure her safety, but she seems sensible, she won't go wandering off the way Nick might." Jenny winced at what she heard down the phone line, and shifted her weight to lean against the bonnet of the car. Sir James Lester was in fine form, and it sounded like this was going to be a long and painful conversation.

A disembodied voice from behind the jeep Jenny was perching on whispered: "Miss Lewis, is he gone?"

"Is who- oh, Liz! I've got your father on the phone here! Would you like to speak to him?"

Liz took in Jenny's expression, and then nodded reassuringly and took the phone. "Hi, Dad," she said briskly. "I promise not to get killed or injured –I swear I won't even so much as sprain an ankle- but I'm here now, and actually, this is a far more interesting way of spending my afternoon than mouldering about at home, and I was in more danger on Duke of Edinburgh than I ever could be here, the place is drowning in Special Forces. You employ this lot. I seem to remember hearing you say you handpick them. So put a little trust in them and stop harassing Miss Lewis. Love you! Don't forget to visit Jamie! See you tonight!" She ended the call, and handed the phone back to Jenny, who was sneakily admiring of this performance and trying to hide it. "There, he won't bother you any more."

"I- er- I don't know if I should thank you," Jenny said, looking rapidly down at the phone and up again at Liz, as if she was astonished to see it.

Liz grinned mischievously. "Thank me. It never hurts."

Jenny grinned back. "Thank you, then." She sobered. "Now, I think you can be very useful."

Liz frowned; Jenny's tone alerted her to something wrong. "What's happened?"

"One of the missing girls has turned up," Jenny said quietly.

"Alive or dead?" Liz asked instantly.

"She's alive, just scratches and bruises, but hysterical whenever anyone tries to interview her- all but gibbering. She's about three years younger than you. Do you think you can?..." Jenny trailed off, wondering if the girl was capable of this. She supposed she would just have to trust her, and really, someone needed to talk to that child.

"Talk to her? I'll try. Who is she? Where is she?" Liz said, mind running off with practicalities and plans.

"She's not the minister's daughter, thank God."

Liz smiled slightly, evidently waiting for a proper answer. Jenny relented. "Her name's Rhona Davies; her parents are diplomats in Cairo. She's currently sitting in the bar, wearing a foil blanket and watching the windows like they're going to bite her."

"Don't blame her." Liz heaved a deep sigh, and scrubbed a hand through her hair.

"If it-"

"It's not too much bother or too much trouble, Miss Lewis, I'm just thinking about how," Liz answered before Jenny had finished the question.

"I think Jenny will do."

Liz smiled properly. "Okay. Jenny." She ditched the hoodie and the backpack in the back of the jeep, extracting her purse and her mobile phone from the bag before heading casually for the Carrot and Stick, selecting her Aunt Alison's number from the phonebook and calling it before meandering on at a leisurely pace, talking fairly loudly.

"Oh, hi, Auntie. No, nothing's wrong... No, Jamie's not any worse, don't worry. Yes, dad's fine. How's Uncle Theo?... Oh, good. Is his knee better?"

Nick appeared. "Jenny, what the hell is she _doing_?"

"I have no idea," Jenny muttered.

Liz was perfectly aware of the consternation and irritation she was causing, but that was fine. She wanted the Girl Guide, what's-her-name, Rhona, to hear her coming and hopefully feel safer. She ambled slowly up to the pub, ignoring the stares she was gathering, and then stepped inside, making sure to knock over a row of umbrellas and swear in a reassuringly human fashion. She had more confidence than Jenny would have expected; she'd had to have a quiet discussion with an unfortunate young cadet who had started her period on CCF camp, and that surely beat everything that could possibly happen for awkwardness.

The Carrot and Stick was a gastropub, with a menu on good paper up by the door and specials written on blackboards. Everything was polished and there was a distracted woman by the bar.

"Are you sure you don't want anything, pet?" she was saying to a girl sitting hunched on a stool, dressed as if for the outside, muddied and scratched, although someone had cleaned her up a bit. Possibly a hose had been involved.

"Hello?" Liz called, pretending not to have seen anyone, and then 'caught sight' of the woman and the girl and said cheerfully "Oh hi!" with her most welcoming smile and nicest upper-class accent. Now was not the time to be snarky or shy.

She wandered over, being sure to keep a decent distance from the girl Rhona, and smiled again at the woman. "Excuse me, ma'am, are you the landlady?"

"Yes. Yes, I am." The woman straightened and smoothed her shirt. "Er, I'm sorry, miss, I can't help you-"

"I'm with that lot out there. Don't ask, it's a long story!" Liz pulled a comical face. "Can I have a Coke, please?" Liz asked the landlady, still smiling, holding her purse in one hand. "-And- Christ, kid, you look like you need something," she said kindly, using her talking-to-scared-eleven-year-olds voice. "D'you want a drink? What would you like?"

"Water, please," Rhona Davies whispered. She wasn't much over eleven, as it happened; a tiny thing for her age, too. She had hazel eyes, and she was still trembling with fear.

"Sparkling or still?" Liz questioned.

"Still, please." The whisper raised a bit. Liz looked up at the landlady and put on the friendly smile again.

"One Coke and one still water, please."

Looking slightly shell-shocked, the woman did as she asked. Liz went over to the till and paid for the drinks without satisfying the burning curiosity the woman was evidently beginning to feel, and took the water over to Rhona, sipping her own drink as she did so.

Rhona took the drink from her with shaking hands, but didn't spill any. "Thank you," she said in a stronger voice. "I'll pay you back."

"Don't worry about it. Seriously, you look like you need it. What's your name?" Liz asked.

"Rhona," Rhona answered.

"I'm Liz," Liz introduced herself. "And I'm not going to ask you to say anything, but I want you to listen, okay?"

Rhona looked sharply at her.

"Yeah," Liz said softly, jerking her head at the open door. "I'm with them. Don't ask, it is _such _a long story. Okay. Do you know what Duke of Edinburgh is?"

Rhona sniffled, wiped her nose with her finger and nodded, looking at her.

"Well," Liz said, still talking quietly, "last year I was on Duke of Edinburgh and my group was attacked by something kind of like something I just bet attacked your group of Guides t- jeez!"

Rhona's muscles had spasmed involuntarily, and she had almost dropped her glass; cold water slopped over its sides.

"I think we should maybe put that down," Liz suggested. Rhona put it aside obediently, but she was visibly more frightened than she had been before.

"I- I don't want to talk about it."

"You don't have to," Liz said soothingly. "Just look at me, okay? I'm here, aren't I? Alive and well?"

Rhona nodded, looking rather perplexed.

"See? I survived. You survived. It'll be okay, Rhona, I promise, but we need to help the others 'cause they're still lost. Can you tell me how you got here?" Liz really hoped this would not bring on another fit of the fight-or-flight reflex.

Rhona hesitated, then nodded again, more slowly. "I- I was running- and I tripped- and I fell and it was cold for a moment, like running through a wall of water, and I got up again and I started running 'cause they get you if you fall and then I realised I was in school-"

"_Fuck_!" Liz breathed. _In the actual fucking _school_?_ she thought, horrified.

The girl shot her a startled look, and she plastered the reassuring smile back on again. "Sorry. Carry on, Rhona."

Rhona took a deep breath that cracked a bit with a sob. "-and-and I ran to the Nurse's office and I- I- told her-" She started crying.

"Told her what, Rhona?" Liz said insistently.

"I told her- I told her- Sally's dead!" the girl sobbed, collapsing into a fit of crying.

"Okay," Liz said. "Okay." She put an arm around the girl carefully.

"The- the- the things, they took her down and the- they-"

"It's okay, Rhona, you don't need to tell me, I know," Liz said as the younger girl clung to her, weeping furiously. _So what now? _Looking down at the top of the girl's head, it seemed obvious some adult more fit to deal with this kind of thing ought to take charge right now. Possibly sedation? Liz thought wildly to herself. Dreamless sleep might help. She knew it would have helped her after the dino-knickerless incident, when the nightmares had seemed endless and she'd woken up screaming. "Okay, come with me now."

Her Coke had been set aside for some time, and now she got up off the bar stool she was sitting on and half-lifted the other girl; they stumbled out into daylight together. Liz looked around quickly, but Miss Lewis was nowhere to be seen and this wasn't her field anyway, but luckily the appropriate people spotted her rather than the other way round. The medic from before hurried over. "Shock?" he asked, looking at the girl. He evidently hadn't treated her before; Liz wondered who had. "What happened?"

"I have no clue, and I think she saw a friend torn to pieces," Liz muttered, helping Rhona, still sobbing, over to a stretcher. "Okay, Rhona, now I'm going to leave you here, if that's okay," she said louder, asking herself what it was about the word 'okay' that made it so handy in a crisis. "Look at me now. Look at me now."

Rhona looked at her. "You're safe, okay, Rhona? You're safe. Okay?"

Rhona nodded, and then burst into fresh tears. Liz hugged her briefly, and then fled, leaving .

"Jenny! Jenny!" she yelled as soon as she was a little way away from the girl.

"-Yes, Liz, _what is it_!" Jenny sounded annoyed to have been interrupted; she was talking quietly to a stern soldier with short dark hair. "I was busy-"

"Not any more," Liz said grimly. "I got Rhona to talk and she said when she got away she found herself running through something that made her cold, like running through a sheet of cold water. Have you ever been through an anomaly? Is it like that?"

"I have," the soldier said, staring hard at her; she ignored the stare. "Yes. It is like that."

"Well we're fucked then, because she said that the next thing she knew, she was _at school_. Jenny, there's an anomaly in a sodding boarding school!"

Jenny stared at her for a moment. "Oh fuck," she said comprehensively, and dashed off; Liz and the soldier pelted after her and caught up as she seized Connor by the shoulder, demanding he check his portable anomaly detector. Liz grabbed the borrowed hoodie and her backpack, stuffing purse and mobile phone into the bag, yanking the hoodie over her head and slinging the bag over her shoulder. She ran over to Jenny just as Connor's anomaly detector, which hadn't been checked for some time due to Connor's attempts to properly identify the unspecified troodontids, confirmed what Rhona had said. Jenny swore, started for her car and swore again.

So leaving it behind _had_ been a mistake, Liz thought.

And so, for the second time in as many hours, they all piled into the scientists' jeep and hared off towards another anomaly.

* * *

_Redwood House School, Day and Boarding, Headmaster Mr. Aaron Harrington_, read the sign as the jeep crunched over gravel through open ironwork gates and stopped. Doors popped open and occupants shot out, staring at the gracious cream-coloured buildings, where there was absolutely no sign of upheaval or nasty little dinosaurs whatsoever.

Liz stared for a moment longer, looking for any sign of life. The school appeared to be almost totally empty; it seemed nearly everyone was out enjoying outdoor shenanigans with the Girl Guides or the Boy Scouts.

Then they heard the sound of running, and a girl perhaps eleven years flew out of a building and clattered along the gravel –Liz winced; the child was wearing a straw boater- but she wasn't screaming, she was laughing, and another girl shot after her, yelling gleefully. They stopped to look at the cars drawing up and disgorging members of the Special Forces, but it wasn't long before one shrieked "Tag! You're It!" and the other yelped and chased after the shrieker at high speed.

Connor shook his head, as if to clear it, and blinked at the girls' disappearing figures. Jenny watched them go, stunned, and then turned to Liz. "You're sure?..."

"I'm sure," Liz said flatly. "Rhona was in pieces, but she was quite clear about that. Something like cold water, and then she was at school. Jenny?"

"What?"

"Is that a garden shed over there?"

Jenny looked in the direction Liz waved an arm at. There was, indeed, a squat grey shed there, a couple of tasteful and prickly-edged dark ferns in large pots beside it to try and stop it being an eyesore. "Probably. Why?"

"You find all sorts of usefully lethal things in garden sheds, that's why," Liz told her, starting out for it in a determined fashion. "My aunt terrifies badly-behaved pupils with stories of her garden shed and keeps it double-locked. I doubt this lot do."

"No breaking and entering!" Jenny shouted after her in a vaguely admonishing fashion.

"What do you think the pot plants are for?" Liz bellowed back without turning.

Jenny gave up on dissuading her, and waved a hand at a couple of soldiers. "Keep an eye on her for a moment, will you? I doubt the anomaly's in a garden shed, and any dinosaurs would probably have broken through the door, but..."

The soldiers nodded, and caught up with the girl, who was bending over and fishing through the sharp leaves of the ferns, with the occasional squeak of pain as she acquired the leafy equivalent of a papercut. Liz straightened, sucking her wounded fingers and brandishing a key, which she stuffed into the padlock on the shed and turned with a flourish. "Bingo," she said with satisfaction, and then noticed that the soldiers had guns pointed at the inside of the shed and frowned. "It's a _shed_."

"It's an unsecured location in a possibly dangerous area," was the bland retort. Liz considered the neatly delivered phrase, conceded the argument with an inelegant shrug, and trotted over the threshold.

The shed was utterly devoid of murderous troodontids, but it did contain rather a lot of interestingly dangerous gardening implements. The soldiers watched as Liz rifled through hedge-trimmers, lawn-mowers, secateurs, shears, and other such things, before lighting on something that looked like a long metal tube with a plastic hand-grip and a gas-bottle on one end with a frighteningly pleased grin. "Perfect!"

"And what's that, miss?" one of the soldiers asked, eyeing it doubtfully.

"It's a weed-killer," Liz explained, leaving the shed and locking it tidily behind her. She put the key back –with a hiss and a curse for the sharp leaves- and started back off towards Jenny. "It's like a Bunsen burner on the end of a metal stick, look." She flicked a switch, and a blue flame burst roaring into life at the end of it.

The soldiers exchanged glances. They'd heard that this kid was Sir James's daughter, but neither of them could visualise Sir James casually brandishing the vengeful gardener's answer to persistent weeds like it was a toy broom.

Liz paid them no attention, but caught up to Jenny and her escort of scientists and watchful soldiers. "New toy," she said briefly, and demonstrated the weed-killer again.

Jenny stopped short, staring at it. "What do you need _that _for?"

"It's an improvement on the stick I used last time," Liz said, suddenly a lot grimmer. "There are more of these troodontids than there were deinonychus, and I am not going to be caught short. I had enough of that last time."

"Oh," was all Jenny said, and together they moved forward, towards the open entrance of the school.


End file.
